The present invention relates to vehicle-mounted safety systems for helping to prevent injury to pedestrians in the event of contact with a moving vehicle.
Modern vehicles use combinations of sensors and other mechanisms to pre-sense and confirm vehicle impacts with pedestrians. Once sensors have confirmed physical impact with a pedestrian the rapid deployment of expendable protective devices occurs. The downfalls of this approach are: (1) pre-contact sensing is expensive; (2) pre-contact sensing is not reliable or cost effective enough to commit to pre-deployment of protective devices. (i.e., deployment prior to contact, so as to be in position in the event of contact); (3) physical contact sensing is required (with or without pre-sensing) to confirm impact.
Thus a need exists for a pedestrian safety system including components capable of operatively coupling to sensors and a controller that are present in the vehicle for purposes other than operation of the safety system. A need also exists for a system which is resettable and operable to pre-position an energy-absorbing device for contact with a pedestrian, prior to contact.